Frances Williams Preston, country music exec, dies at 83

By Peter Cooper and Anita Wadhwani,, The Tennessean

Frances Williams Preston, the Nashville native who began her professional career as a mail messenger and became one of the most successful and consequential executives in the history of the music industry, died Wednesday morning of congestive heart failure. She was 83.

2001 AP photo

Frances W. Preston, who worked with top songwriters as president of the royalties company Broadcast Music, Inc., in Nashville, died Wednesday. She was 83.

Frances W. Preston, who worked with top songwriters as president of the royalties company Broadcast Music, Inc., in Nashville, died Wednesday. She was 83.

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Preston was a maverick whose work makes her an architect of modern-day Nashville.

"Frances was awe-inspiring," said acclaimed singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash. "I looked up to her so much — she was a charming, powerful woman in an entrenched boys club. She rose to the top, and gathered admirers as she advanced, rather than enemies. She had a lot of grace, a keen eye for business and a true love of music."

Preston was a transformational figure who led the performance rights organization BMI and established BMI's Nashville office in 1958. She was the first female executive on Nashville's Music Row and the first female corporate executive in Tennessee.

Preston was integral in building Nashville's reputation as a music center, in raising millions of charity dollars (enabling the creation of the Frances Williams Preston Research Laboratories at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center) and in helping to establish the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

"She was like the mayor, the chamber of commerce and the head of the bank," said Jody Williams, vice president of writer/publisher relations at BMI, who holds the same job Preston did when she hired Williams for his first job in the music business more than 30 years ago.

"She made BMI into the city hall of Nashville," he said. "The people that helped make this Music City were the artists, of course, but if you had to pick a business figure, the single biggest one that made Nashville 'Music City' was Frances Preston."

She was a giant: a member of the Country Music and Gospel Music halls of fame, a recipient of The Recording Academy's National Trustees Award. Her Country Music Hall of Fame plaque cites her as "the most influential country music executive of her generation," and one does not achieve such a designation without a measure of steel. Indeed, Preston was a fierce business competitor, particularly when vying for assets against BMI's performance-rights rival, ASCAP.

Yet her humanity trumped her tenacity, and her ultimate loyalty was to songs and songwriters, not to any one company. As tributes flow from her BMI associates, it's instructive to consider the thoughts of one of ASCAP's iconic writers, Don Schlitz.

"She's one of the grand matriarchs of country music, and a friend to all songwriters," Schlitz said.

Thom Schuyler met Preston more than 20 years ago as a 25-year-old songwriter who had just arrived in Nashville to pursue that dream. Preston inspired the kind of loyalty among songwriters that helped grow BMI into the biggest employer on Music Row, a home base for many of the town's iconic songwriters.

"I was young and nervous, but when you are one-on-one with Frances, it's like being with a family member," said Schuyler, who went on to become a successful BMI songwriter with songs recorded by more than 200 artists.

A woman in what was then almost an exclusively male music industry, Preston served as mentor to many women — and a great many men — who followed.

"It took me about 15 minutes to realize that she was the only woman who had the key to the men's room," said Mary Ann McCready, a partner with artist management group Flood, Bumstead, McCready & McCarthy, Inc. "She helped me think like a man. The truth was Frances was very firm about her efforts and what she believed in. She also had a huge heart. That was true of other people at the time —Billy Sherrill and Chet Atkins. But they were guys, and they maybe didn't have to be quite so firm, because their gender allowed for that. Frances had to be tougher just to play on that gameboard."

Preston started out, however, as a mail messenger in the 1950s, a job that involved answering BMI songwriter Hank Williams' fan mail. She soon began serving as a receptionist at WSM and hosting a fashion and style program for WSM-TV. Trained as a teacher, she was also an eager student who learned the inner workings of the entertainment business and impressed the songwriters, recording artists and industry honchos she met.

Robert J. Burton, president of BMI, hired her in 1958 and charged her with opening a Nashville office for the company, which collects and distributes royalties to songwriters and publishers. BMI's Nashville headquarters was initially . Preston's parents' garage, but a more substantial structure was erected for a 1962 opening, and the BMI building on 16th Avenue South became a Music Row hallmark (aided by expansions in 1964 and 1995).

Just after joining BMI, Preston organized a ceremony — an early-morning breakfast — to honor top country songwriters. George Jones, Buck Owens, Johnny Cash, Mel Tillis, Roger Miller, Wilma Lee Cooper, Harlan Howard, Don Everly and other greats received awards that day, and in 1959 the breakfast became a black-tie dinner with Preston serving as the stylish hostess.

More than a half century later, the BMI Country Awards draws some of country music's top talents, and it is among the most coveted tickets of Nashville's annual, late-autumn awards season.

Frances Williams married businessman E.J. Preston in 1962 and changed her last name to Preston, which she kept even though the two were later divorced. In 1964, Preston became BMI's vice president and in so doing became the first female executive in Tennessee.

Preston would later recall that in 1964 women were not even allowed in the main dining room at the then-powerful Cumberland Club downtown. But Preston skillfully averted, ignored or busted through whatever impediments existed for women in those times, as she worked with Loretta Lynn, Tom T. Hall, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, Felice and Boudleaux Bryant and many others to maximize opportunities for country songwriters and publishers.

In 1985, Preston shifted to a position as senior vice president of performing rights and relocated to BMI's New York headquarters. She was named BMI's president and chief executive officer in 1986, and as president she increased revenues and royalty distribution to more than 300,000 songwriters, composers and publishers.

BMI's revenue tripled during her tenure as BMI chief, and Preston led the way in licensing new digital media.

She also fought for fair compensation for writers and performers in the digital era, spending time on Capitol Hill to promote copyright protection. In the mid-1990s, she was a member of Vice President Al Gore's National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council. By then, she was already a Country Music Hall of Famer, having been inducted in 1992. Later, she would become a member of the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame (in 1999) and the Gospel Music Hall of Fame (2004).

Creating mutual respect

Preston's significance to and popularity among songwriters was underscored in 2010, when the Nashville Songwriters Foundation gave her a Mentor Award and subsequently renamed the trophy the Frances Williams Preston Mentor Award. At that ceremony, Grammy-nominated songwriter and presenter Layng Martine Jr. said Mrs. Preston had actually mentored the city of Nashville, championing songwriters as professionals.

"You gave us respect, and you got us respect," he said.

In return, songwriters respected Preston. In March 2012 at the Martell Honors (Preston's favorite philanthropic endeavor was her work with the T.J. Martell Foundation, a cancer research organization that has become the music industry's leading charity), Preston joined Emmylou Harris in presenting Kris Kristofferson with a prize that had been renamed the Frances Williams Preston Lifetime Music Industry Award.

"I can't think of an honor I would value more in my whole life than a Frances Preston award," said Kristofferson, a Country Music Hall of Famer.

BMI's Jody Williams first met Preston when he was a teenager, a schoolmate to her two sons who found he was always welcome to hang out at the Preston home. He said he returned to her again and again for career advice over the years. But Williams went silent when asked what she must think about his career.

"I'm sorry, I'm getting choked up," he said. "I'm certain she's proud of me. And there's not a day that goes by when I don't face a question and I don't say, 'What would Frances do?' Because she's been through every scenario."

Visit USA TODAY's sister site,Tennessean.com/music, to see historical photo galleries of Frances Preston and to read more thoughts about her life and achievements.

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